Ever wanted to be in charge? Well, in my own little world I will be, one day. Just not quite yet. I'm a bit tired at the moment... maybe I'll take over after I've had my little nap.
The United Dingdom - stating the bleeding obvious so you don't have to.
(Sign up to get updates direct to email or follow @Battsby on Twitter)

Pages

Friday, 2 December 2016

The Death of Satire

All hail the mighty
man-girl-child-genderblack-wrongskinned-dudewench Godfrey Elfwick who trolled
the Guardian the other day with this magnificent cheek-tongued piece of hilarity. Cue the barrage of mediocre attempts by the inspirationally challenged who will
now be machine-gunning the popular press with Viz-level parody in the hope of
being published. I have no such illusions and bow before the towering sage of
our age, for Godfrey truly is a one manwoman multicultural emblem for our
millennium.

The whole phenomenon of fake news is rendering satire a
tricky medium to work in as it is becoming almost impossible to distinguish
fake from fiction. It was bad enough when we only had climate nutjobs,
illuminati adherents, chemtrail devotees and vegans to scoff at. Now, even the
most outlandish of human experiences could be real. The Guardian, from once
being a respected bastion of journalistic integrity [citation needed] leads the
charge into Narnia by stuffing its pages with opinion pieces masquerading as
news. Godfrey’s little saga slotted right into their editorial narrative.

So, anything goes, nothing is real, up is down and coupled with a net population change of close on a million a year (650,000 in, 300,000+
out) pretty soon we won’t even have good old British phlegmatism to rely on.
You’ll be able to tell people anything and they’ll believe it. Oh, wait, we’re
there already: A recent scientific study has found pregnant women who use
vibrators are 90% more likely to have a child who stutters. Accordion to surveys
most people don’t notice when you replace words with the names of musical
instruments. A pizza is a three-dimensional pie chart... that shows you how
much pizza you have left. And an Oxygen atom went into the bar and said “I’m
thirsty; give me a hydrogen atom. Wait; better make it a double.”

And there’s your problem. What do you get when you
combine a joke with a rhetorical question? How can you take seriously a report
which reads like an early Monty Python sketch? The surreal has become... a
fish; Dali would be right at home. Political parties, ever the opportunists,
are working on ways to get to grips with this post-factual reality, to which
end Jeremy Corbyn has been employing a stage hypnotist at his cabinet meetings
to render his shadow appointees susceptible to new ideas without having to
filter them through a sieve of cynicism and mistrust.

Separating fact from faction...

Having realised a modicum of success through this
technique, the hypnotist was invited to assist at JC’s keynote conference
speech recently. The lights were dimmed, the audience hushed to silence and they
all focused on the man on the platform. He took out a shiny gold watch on a
chain and invited them to observe as he began to slowly swing it from side to
side. As one, the attendees followed the watch, their eyelids began to get
heavy, they found themselves relaxing... relaxing... entering a deep
sleeeeeeep. But suddenly the watch-chain slipped from his grasp. “Shit!” exclaimed
the hypnotist. It took a week to clean up the conference hall.